Podcasts about my faraway one selected letters

Saturday, March 30, will mark the opening of the Georgia O'Keeffe exhibition at the Wichita Art Museum.To honor the occasion I will read a few passages from her letters to her husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz, taken from the book My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, edited by Sarah Greenough.

Love of, love in, and love as art - the colorful love story of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz. (*) Sharon and Scott Jacobs. Lovin SoDak’s and Wayne Porter’s take on sculpture gardens - and that’s no bull. And, our Tales from The Heart of America original narrative reveals that like art, love is in the eye of the holder in a story called Love is Art. CREDITS: http://lovin-america.blubrry.net/the-art-of-love-046 All this and more on this episode of Lovin America. (Like the podcast? For as little as $1 a month you can Become a Patron of Love in America and help keep the lovin’ comin’! https://www.patreon.com/lovinamerica)  Links: Lead in song: Lovity Love by Something Underground; Wayne Porter, Porter Sculpture Park, Montrose, SD (http://portersculpturepark.com/);  Georgia O’Keeffe & Alfred Stieglitz:  From DesignSponge.com - Wild Love: Alfred Stieglitz & Georgia O’Keeffe, by Mary Kathryn Paynter (http://www.designsponge.com/2012/09/wild-love-alfred-stieglitz-georgia-okeeffe.html);  From Harper’s Bazaar - Georgia O'Keeffe's Younger Man (https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a14033/georgia-okeeffe-0316/);  From Mental Floss - 15 Things You Should Know About Georgia O’Keeffe, by Kristy Punchko (http://mentalfloss.com/article/63175/15-things-you-should-know-about-georgia-okeeffe);  Georgia O’Keeffe Museum (https://www.okeeffemuseum.org/about-georgia-okeeffe/timeline/);  From Wikipedia:  Georgia O’Keeffe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_O'Keeffe);  Alfred Stieglitz (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Stieglitz);  From Amazon.com - My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz: Volume One, 1915-1933, by Sarah Greenough (https://goo.gl/txR1Yo);   Lovin America website: https://www.LovinAmerica.us;  Lovin America YouTube Channel: https://tinyurl.com/YouTube-LovinAmerica 

This week on StoryWeb: Alfred Stieglitz’s photographs The Terminal and Winter, Fifth Avenue. In the 1890s, as Alfred Stieglitz was beginning his career, photographers were fighting for artistic recognition. Photographers who wanted to go beyond “mere” journalism or documentary photography had to show their critics the value of their “mechanistic” art. Photographers like Stieglitz were trying to prove to skeptics that the camera could be used not only as a journalistic tool (as Jacob Riis used it in How the Other Half Lives) but that photographs could also have value as art. Stieglitz was unquestionably the leader of the movement to gain artistic recognition for photography. A pioneer in subject matter, technique, and treatment, Stieglitz shot many “firsts,” among them the first snow photograph, Winter, Fifth Avenue (shot in 1893), the first rain photo, A Wet Day on the Boulevard [Paris] (taken in 1894), and the first night shot, Reflections – Night [New York] (created in 1896). In 1897, Stieglitz published Picturesque Bits of New York, a volume of his New York scenes; it sold for the then-whopping price of $15. Stieglitz was concerned with both seeing life as it was and interpreting it morally. Scholar Doris Bry says of him: “To define and fix a moment of reality, to realize the potential of black and white, through photography, fascinated Stieglitz.” But objectivity to Stieglitz was not enough. In a 1908 article in the New York Herald, Stieglitz stressed the importance of the “personal touch” and the “individual expression” of the artist. He said, “I saw what others were doing was to make hard, cold copies of hard, cold subjects in hard, cold light. . . . I did not see why a photograph should not be a work of art, and I studied to make it one.” Though Stieglitz hailed from Hoboken, New Jersey, New York was his adopted city. As Bry says, “he came to love [the city], it became home to him.” Art critic Neil Leonard says, “Stieglitz’s photographs of these years held strong emotional meaning for him, yet they realistically captured . . . the sights, rhythms, and moods of the city.” Two of Stieglitz’s New York photos are particularly compelling to me, both shot in 1893: The Terminal and Winter, Fifth Avenue. Stieglitz said, “From 1893 to 1895 I often walked the streets of New York downtown, near the East River, taking my hand camera with me.” According to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Stieglitz’s small Folmer and Schwing 4 x 5 plate film camera was “an instrument not considered at the time to be worthy of artistic photography.” Stieglitz threw away his “unwieldy” 8 x 10 view camera and its tripod, choosing the 4 x 5 camera, which, says The Met, “gave [him] greater freedom and mobility to roam the city and respond quickly to the ever-changing street life around him.” The Terminal was captured at the southern end of the Harlem streetcar line, which traveled up and down Fifth Avenue. One day, said Stieglitz, “I found myself in front of the old Post Office. . . . It was extremely cold. Snow lay on the ground. A driver in a rubber coat was watering his steaming car horses. How fortunate the horses seemed, having a human being to tend them. The steaming horses being watered on a cold winter day, the snow-covered streets . . . [expressed] my own sense of loneliness in my own country.” In another description of The Terminal, Stieglitz said, “I used to walk around the streets disconsolately, until one night during a blizzard, I happened to see a man, watering a couple of horse-car horses, and I thought, ‘Well, there at any rate is the human touch; ‘ that made me feel better.” Of the same incident, Stieglitz told biographer Dorothy Norman, “There seemed to me to be something closely related to my deepest feeling in what I saw . . . and I decided to photograph what was within me.” Winter, Fifth Avenue was taken the same year, also with a 4 x 5 box camera. Journalist and novelist Theodore Dreiser, who was heavily influenced by Stieglitz, said of this photograph: “The driving sleet and uncomfortable atmosphere issued out of the picture with uncomfortable persuasion. It had the tone of reality.” What seems to have impressed Dreiser most about Stieglitz’s photography, however, was the huge amount of time and effort Stieglitz took in making the final prints. Patience was necessary at all stages: setting up the scene, working with the negative, making the print. Indeed, according to The Art Story website, Stieglitz “stalked Fifth Avenue for three frigid hours waiting for the perfect moment.” Stieglitz himself told the story this way: On Washington’s birthday in 1893, a great blizzard raged in New York. I stood on a corner of Fifth Avenue, watching the lumbering stagecoaches appear through the blinding snow and move northward on the avenue. The question formed itself: could what I was experiencing, seeing, be put down with the slot plates and lenses available? The light was dim. Knowing that where there is light, one can photograph, I decided to make an exposure. After three hours of standing in the blinding snow, I saw the stagecoach come struggling up the street with the driver lashing his horses onward. At that point, I was nearly out of my head, but I got the exposure I wanted. Often, the negatives produced were discouraging. Such was the case with Winter, Fifth Avenue, the original negative of which was so blurry that a fellow photographer said, “For God’s sake, Stieglitz, throw that thing away.” But Stieglitz focused on a portion of the negative that he felt was usable and managed to manipulate it in the darkroom until he got what he wanted. The result is a stunning photograph indeed. Good overviews of Stieglitz’s work can be found at The Metropolitan Museum of Art website and the PBS American Masters website. The New York Times review of “Alfred Stieglitz New York,” a 2010 exhibit at the Seaport Museum, offers additional insights into Stieglitz’s depictions of his adopted city. Books you might want to add to your collection include Alfred Stieglitz: Masters of Photography Series (which features The Terminal on the cover) and Alfred Stieglitz: Photographs & Writings. Alfred Stieglitz: A Biography offers a comprehensive look at Stieglitz’s immense influence on photography. To explore the artistic connections between Stieglitz and his wife, painter Georgia O’Keeffe, check out Two Lives: A Conversation in Paintings and Photographs – and to learn more about their personal lives, dip into My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz. Visit thestoryweb.com/Stieglitz for links to all these resources and to watch the PBS American Masters episode: “Alfred Stieglitz: The Eloquent Eye.” Tune in next week for an exploration of Stephen Crane and his journalistic essays about New York life during the 1890s.

The editor of My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, Vol 1 discusses the relationship of the two artists. [29:32]

The editor of My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, Vol 1 discusses the relationship of the two artists. [29:32]

The editor of My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, Vol 1 discusses the relationship of the two artists.

The editor of My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, Vol 1 discusses the relationship of the two artists. [29:32]